Comparison of Customer Journeys: ASOS vs Boots

This article compares and evaluates the customer journeys of ASOS and Boots, two brands in the ecommerce segment. It discusses their strategies, technology implementation, and customer engagement practices. The analysis shows that ASOS has a more efficient and effective customer journey compared to Boots.

Running head: CUSTOMER JOURNEY
CUSTOMER JOURNEY
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author Note

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Table of Contents
Introduction................................................................................................................................2
Discussion..................................................................................................................................2
Overview of the two brands:..................................................................................................2
ASOS-................................................................................................................................2
Boots-.................................................................................................................................3
ASOS- Steps towards enhanced Customer Journey:.............................................................3
ASOS Customer journey:.......................................................................................................4
Boots- Initiative towards improved customer journey:..........................................................6
Boots Customer Journey:.......................................................................................................7
Comparison:...........................................................................................................................8
Conclusion..................................................................................................................................9

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Introduction
An entire sum of experiences through which the consumer pass through in the process
of interaction with a brand or company is known as the Customer Journey. The journey of a
consumer comprises of the full steps of transaction rather than concentration on a specific
area. The journey map of customers are the visual representation of a process customer
experiences and goes through for achieving the goal with a specific brand. The purpose of the
paper is to compare and evaluate the customer journeys of two brands, which have presence
in ecommerce segments. The brands, which will be discussed in this paper, are ASOS and
Boots. The paper will be discussing the concepts through a model of Customer Journey. The
paper tends to argue on the efficiency of the consumer journeys of the selected brands by
comparing their e-commerce segments.
Discussion
Overview of the two brands:
ASOS-
The British brand ASOS specializes in online business of fashion and cosmetics by
playing the role of a retailer. ASOS was founded in the year 2000 in the city of London. The
brand majorly targets young adults as their consumer segments. The website of AOS
comprises of more than 850 brands and it is known for its home brands consisting accessories
and clothing. The Company ships the products around 200 countries from the centres of UK,
Europe and US. Nick Beighton is the CEO of the company as presented a statement about the
brand, “We love doing things differently. Today’s iteration of our values is authenticity,
bravery and creativity” (asosplc.com, 2019). The reason for selecting this brand for the
evaluation of customer journey as the brand believes in eliminating all barriers for customers
in the process of acquiring a new outfit. ASOS attempts to facilitate the advancement in

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technology, which can help with the efficiency of warehousing and with the delivery services
for making the best shopping experiences of customers.
Boots-
Boots is a UK based company founded in the year 1849, formerly known as Boots the
Chemists Ltd. The company specializes in health and beauty products and have retail chains.
The company was merged with Alliance Unichem in the year 2006, which formed Alliance
Boots, which was bought by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts and Stefano Pessina by moving the
headquarters of Boots to Switzerland. In 2014, Alliance Boots was completely bought by
Walgreens, which resulted in the subsidizing of Boots for the company Walgreens Boots
Alliance (boots.com, 2019). The reason for selecting this brand for evaluation of customer
journey is the implementation of its strategy for entering into the e-commerce business
segment for constructing a better customer journey.
ASOS- Steps towards enhanced Customer Journey:
ASOS considers itself to be a technology and a fashion company. The functionality
and role of our tech teams is similar to the teams of designers because as designers,
technology team is on a continual improvement process for developing the best experiences
in online shopping (Chang & Kannan, 2015). The innovation comprises of improvement or
development of app, the technology in the apps synchronizes all the saved items in the cart to
all the devices of a consumer. The estimated amount of consumer who are active in the
installed app of ASOS is 10 million as well as around 69 percent of the traffic is coming from
the mobile devices of consumers (asosplc.com, 2019).
With the continual process of improving the technology in the ecommerce site, results
in the improvement in the customer journey. The results of the improved customer journey
can be depicted by an activity practiced by the brand in one of its social media accounts,
Instagram (Kietzmann, Paschen & Treen, 2018). The activity involved a campaign, which

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was named as #AsSeemOnMe, where the consumers were encouraged to upload pictures
with all their ASOS buys and the hashtag #AsSeemOne (asosplc.com, 2019). This practice-
involved consumer uploading pictures on Instagram (where they have around 400 million
followers) or directly uploading it into our website by coordinating it with actual product
(Anderl et al., 2016). This allowed the consumers to have an exposure of their skills of
styling the pieces and facilitated the suitability factor of the other set of consumer. Both the
cases contributed in adding value to the customer experience resulting in an effective
customer journey. The campaign involved 124k submissions between the month January and
July in the year 2016 and around 43.6k people were found following the practice
@AsSeenOnMe (asosplc.com, 2019).
ASOS Customer journey:
Fig. Customer Journey
STIMULUS
CONSIDERATION
EXPERIENCES
PURCHASE
AND SERVICES

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(Source: Rosenbaum, Otalora & Ramírez, 2017).

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Stimulus-
 The stimulus for ASOS includes the Public Relation practices, word-of mouth
advertisements, Print advertisements, Online Advertisements, Fashion Blogs.
 Social Media pages can also act as a stimulus for the initial customer engagement
practices.
 All the social media pages of ASOS are directly integrated with the website, which
makes the navigation easier.
Consideration-
 It comprise of the experience in the brand website.
 It depends on the factor of Keyword search volume of ASOS with respect to
competition.
 It also depends on the continuous engagement of consumers for improving the
value of experience.
 The social volume index with respect to the competitors
Fig. The social volume score index

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(Source: Lemon & Verhoef, 2016)
Purchase and Services-
 It includes the ease of payment facilities through the ASOS website or mobile
application (Maheshwari, Sinnott & Morris, 2017).
 ASOS also have Click and Collect facility in UK and efficient delivery services in all
over the world (Maheshwari, Sinnott & Morris, 2017).
 ASOS offers free shipping as well as return facility worldwide.
 It offers 24/7 customer service support
 In the process of purchase, consumers experiences an extensive range of delivery
options.
Experiences-
 It includes various activities for improving the pre and post buying experiences of
consumers.
 For instance, the consumers were asked to participate in an activity of uploading
pictures with the #AsSeenOnMe. It became very popular among the consumer as it
presented the exposure for showcasing the styling ideas a customer may have as well
as it enabled the factor of relatedness by the popularity of this activity as people were
uploading pictures in the Instagram page and in the website by linking with the
products.
Boots- Initiative towards improved customer journey:
Boots have faced challenges for functioning in the traditional process of building
consumer experiences. After the realization of the changing market requirements and
consumer preferences, the company decided to develop strategies for the implementation of

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technological implementation (Gaitniece, Batraga & Viksne, 2017). Improvement of the
website with quality content and smooth integration is the response for the increasing demand
of consumers helped the brand to enter into the e-commerce segment. Boots decided to have
a multichannel approach by collaborating with the experts of multi-channel and by using the
Websphere commerce platform of IBM as well as with the partnership of WSC systems
integrator Salmon of Europe (boots.com, 2019). The collaboration and partnership decision
enabled the brand to integrate all the channels, web call centre and Electronic Point of Sales
(EPOS). The new advanced look of the website and online presence comprised of a wide
range of new functionalities and features for the improvement of consumer shopping
experiences. The website contains a number of customer engagement contents, advices,
information, appealing video contents as well as suggestions for new makeup looks and
health tips (Quinton & Simkin, 2017). Customers of Boots can order products from their
online website with the facility of various modes of delivery process and have queries
resolved through the availability of customer engagement facility.
Boots Customer Journey:
The customer journey of Boots can be analysed by an intensive experiment of the
complete experience of a consumer from the process of search to checkout. The ‘search’
attribute of the brand is a very effective. Although, searching Cheryl Stormflower, which is
one of the bestselling perfume of Boots, will not reflect presence in Search Engine Results
Page (SERP). However, the search results for other products like Stella McCartney perfume,
popular makeup brands like L’Oreal, Revlon and styling tools reflects the dominance of the
brand. The brand uses the feature of Google Seller Ratings in order to differentiate from the
available competitors. If the landing page is considered, which reflects the attributes of an
effective page but it does not have a similar site for both mobile and computer screen, which
makes it a complex process and the pictures, are not as appealing as it could be. Although the

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landing page experience is not effective but the product page reflects effective potential. The
shopping basket of Boots is very complex and cluttered. In the checkout phase, a consumer
will be asked to register herself/himself with the brand’s site, which can be considered
unnecessary, as the customer has already decided to buy a specific product (Crawford, 2018).
Comparison:
Comparing the product based on the six-step model of customer journey:
(Source: Kranzbühler, Kleijnen & Verlegh, 2019)
By comparing, the analysis of the two brands it can be deduced that ASOS has far
better customer journey practices than Boots. Although Boots approach towards
technological implementation is effective but it requires focus in the improvement of the
section of purchase, which will include website and app development. ASOS have reflected
efficient and effective results in the broad categories of ease of navigation, appealing and
technologically advanced website and social media contents as well as the involvement in
constructing activities for improving customer engagement. Boots needs to improve the
ecommerce strategy by incorporating continual technology advancement, which will offer a
competitive edge over available competitors and in return ensure better customer journey.

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Conclusion
Therefore, it can be concluded from the evaluation and comparison of the two brands
ASOS and Boots that the customer journey of the brand ASOS is better than Boots because
of a highly integrative as well as technology based ecommerce business.

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